TORONTO — A Vancouver-based agtech company has hired the chair of Bill Morneau’s advisory council on economic growth, amid efforts to use technology to make organic pesticides more effective than their chemical counterparts.

In an interview with the Financial Post, Terramera CEO Karn Manhas said the company is hiring Dominic Barton, who also serves as the global managing partner emeritus of consulting firm McKinsey & Co., as the chairman of its strategic advisor board.

“When I first connected with (Barton), he said, ‘I’ve had so many people who have said that I need to talk to you that I got the picture,’” Manhas said. “I think his passion for agriculture and his economic and strategic expertise really comes together beautifully here to help us in what we’re trying to scale globally.”

In 2017, Barton’s advisory council on economic growth published a report that highlighted Canada’s agriculture industry potential to eventually become the second-largest exporter of agricultural products. Canada currently ranks fifth on the list of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural products.

Mobilizing Canada’s innovation market and companies such as Terramera would be key to accomplishing that growth, according to the report.

“Part of (seeing that growth) is going to be not only producing more food, but doing it in a way that actually leads the world in producing it in a better way,” Manhas said.

For Manhas, the most difficult challenge to overcome in organic farming is that the natural materials used instead of synthetic chemical pesticides — and the way they’re delivered — aren’t accurate. When they’re delivered, Manhas said, up to 90 per cent of what’s used has no effect because it ends up washing away into the soil.

As a result, Terramera developed Actigate — biotechnology that’s used with organic pesticides or nutrients that are sprayed on plants. Instead of spraying biopesticides from overhead and hoping they are absorbed by their crops, Actigate ensures they directly target and enter plant cells.

The new technology, Manhas hopes, will help the company achieve its lofty goals of decreasing global use of synthetic chemical pesticides by 80 per cent while also increasing global agriculture yields by 20 per cent over 10 years.

In using Actigate as a delivery system, Manhas said, farmers would no longer have to rely on chemical pesticides because the organics would be more accurate and therefore effective. Farmers should also be able to increase yields, he said, by doing the same with nutrients. Healthier plants would result in less waste, he said.

This really started in my basement

Manhas, who has a background in biology and biotechnology, is a former Liberal MLA who represented Port Coquitlam-Burke Mountain, B.C. between 2001 and 2005. But the venture in politics was “a little bit of a side escapade,” Manhas said, for someone who always considered himself an entrepreneur.

Manhas started Terramera in 2010 and “bootstrapped” for the first two years.

“This really started in my basement,” he admits.

It was only in 2012 that he took the company to family and friends, looking for investors.

The company continued to raise funds from local investors and angel investors but had its break in 2016 when it was able to secure US$22 million in investments from backers including Seed 2 Growth, an agriculture venture fund, and Swedish furniture maker IKEA.

Since then, the company has continued its efforts and has reached US$30 million in funding from investors, Manhas said. In October, Terramera added a total of $2.7 million in funding from Canadian and B.C. government initiatives targeting clean tech and startup companies.

With more funds came more employees. In 2016, the company employed 17 people. Now, Terramera plans to have 150 employees by the end of the year and double that in 2019.

The company has seen a 1,000 per cent increase in agriculture sales between 2017 and 2018, according to Manhas and has six new products “in the pipeline” to join the two — both agricultural biopesticides — it already has on the market.

Despite the success, Manhas recognizes that he can’t accomplish his goals — and that Canada can’t rise to fulfilling its potential in the agricultural market — without government on board.

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